Monday 15 March 2010 09.54 EDT
First published on Monday 15 March 2010 09.54 EDT

Waterskiing across the English channel was a make-or-break moment for Christine Bleakley. Succeed and she'd be lauded as a hero, but fail and she'd be doomed to only be remembered as the woman who started crying because she couldn't hold on to a bit of rope for very long. But, magnificently, Bleakley triumphed on Friday, beating all the odds – as a waterskiing novice who couldn't swim and met with less than ideal conditions, even her own trainer appeared to doubt the likelihood of success – and raising lots of cash for Sports Relief in the process.

Now Bleakley has joined the ranks of the celebrity charity stunt immortals such as Ian Botham and the one from Girls Aloud that isn't Cheryl Cole who climbed up that mountain with Cheryl Cole last year. So how does her stunt compare with other celebrities' charity efforts?

David Walliams - channel swimming

Swimming the English channel used to be the sole reserve of goosefat-swaddled poshos called things like Florence and Henry, but David Walliams proved that anybody could do it when he swam from Dover to Calais in 2006. Such was his success that he ended up inspiring a song by The Bluetones. Have any almost-forgotten mid-90s indie bands written a song about Christine Bleakley's waterskis yet?

Eddie Izzard

Any two-bit celebrity can run a marathon, but it takes a very special breed of celebrity to decide to run 43 marathons in the space of seven weeks. However, that's what Eddie Izzard did last year, putting himself through unbelievable agony for Sport Relief. What other celebrity has placed their nipples under a similar level of jeopardy in the name of charity? Painful – although still nowhere near as painful as Izzard's appearance in The Avengers remake.

Ricky Gervais

It's not as gruelling as a channel crossing or two months of marathon-running, Ricky Gervais's decision to fight Grant Bovey in a charity boxing match was undoubtedly much more of a crowd-pleasing stunt. In fact, if punching Bovey in the face for cash was to become a formally recognised charitable endeavour, global poverty would probably be wiped out in a matter of hours.

David Blaine

In 2006, David Blaine spent two days whizzing around inside a gyroscope suspended 40ft in the air before leading 100 underprivileged children on a giant Thanksgiving department store shopping spree. Impressive – although arguably Blaine's greatest act of charity came when he shut himself inside a clear box above London's south bank for 44 days in 2003. Without that selfless act, angry Britons would never have got the chance to indulge in thedual loves of throwing hamburgers at perspex and freaking out scary-eyed magicians with laser pens.